Thursday, April 9, 2009

Abstract 2 Series 2

Abstract 2 from my second series of Abstract comics. I have made about ten so far in this series. You can see the rest at my website drawingsilence. With this series I was interested in exploring using found images as a basis and painting on the gutter of a comic page thus creating the panels. This was early in my experimentation and it didn't quiet work as expected. I thought I could paint the entire image with black and then carefully remove the paint creating panels. However the paint stuck to the paper a lot better than I expected, creating an interesting accident.

1 comment:

From this series I especially love this one. I like the feeling that something mysterious is being revealed, and also (knowing now that you made it from a single, pre-existing image) how the panels "guide" our eye through that image, without allowing us to really know what's going on.

The artists assembled by Andrei Molotiu for his anthology ABSTRACT COMICS (Fantagraphics, $39.99) push “cartooning” to its limits... It’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.

--Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review, Holiday Books edition, December 6, 2009The collection has a wealth of rewarding material... it is a significant historical document that may jump-start an actual new genre.

--Doug Harvey, LA WeeklyIt becomes a treat to take a page of art - or a simple panel - and consider how the shapes, texture, depth, and color interact with one another; to reflect on how, when one takes the time, the enjoyment one ordinarily finds in reading a purely textually-oriented, narrative-driven written story can - with the graphic form - be translated into something completely different.

...this arresting book is like a scoop of primordial narrative, representational mud. Which is to say, it has vitaminic powers.

--Design Observer

For years, comics (at least American ones) have doggedly refused for one reason or another, to consider other schools of art and beyond mere representation. It's only now we see artists attempting to branch out and try to push at the edge's of the medium's definition. As such I found Abstract Comics to be a revealing, thought-provoking and genuinely lovely book that I'll be sure to be rereading in the months to come.